“Cha, cha, 1, 2, 3.”
“Cha, cha, 2, 2, 3.”
“Cha, cha, 3, 2, 3.”
I said it out loud, over and over. In just 30 minutes, I’d be onstage before 375 people, performing a six-minute cha-cha routine with a man I’d partnered with just that afternoon.
My legs were shaking. Before I’d arrived at Dance Camp Las Vegas four days earlier, I’d never done the cha-cha. Now I had to step and turn and spin and wave my arms dramatically while keeping a smile glued on my face, even if I screwed up. (“Smile, ladies,” ordered our Ukrainian instructor, Artem Plakhotnyi. “Always smile.”)
Would I forget a step? Would I fall? Would I run off the dance floor in shame?
I love dancing, but I’m by no means a dancer. This isn’t for lack of trying on my parents’ part. They’d been big dancers when I was a girl, turning the basement of our home in Queens into a party room, complete with a full bar and neon lights, where they and their friends danced salsa, merengue and cumbia well into the mornings. But I moved out of our largely Latino neighborhood 17 years ago and haven’t kept up with my salsa. My only hope now was that dance boot camp had made me a better hoofer than I was before.
After all, if the Karate Kid could learn how to do a sexy salsa number on “Dancing With the Stars” last season, why couldn’t I pull off a similar move?
In case you hadn’t noticed, the country’s gone dance crazy. It’s not just the popularity of shows like “DWTS” and “So You Think You Can Dance?” Nowadays, there are dance-themed cruises and dance camps nationwide to help you learn how to hoof it like Fred and Ginger. (Or pale — and probably ponderous — approximations thereof, anyway.) I’d caught the fever, but could I corral my feet?
At the four-day Mastery Camp by Dance Vision at the Paris Las Vegas hotel, classes ran from 8 a.m. to about 6:30 p.m. each day, with a 90-minute lunch break. The selection of dance styles went on and on: rumba, mambo, international and American tango, East Coast swing, quickstep, international and American waltz. I’d never even heard of some of the dances.
The day before our closing-night performance, I’d been on the verge of giving up. My feet had inflated as much as my confidence had deflated. In practice, I’d miscounted and started the second half of the routine too early, throwing off our timing. Our instructor, Inna Berlizyeva, a lithe blond Ukrainian, had made us redo it multiple times. Seven other couples would be performing with us, and I didn’t want to let them down.
After practice, I’d run into Ron Davidson, a longtime dancer from central Pennsylvania, who tried to pump up my confidence. “Everyone up there messes up. The main thing to do is to keep going,” he counseled. His pep talk had worked — but only briefly. As showtime approached, I was losing my nerve again.
My new partner, Mark Brown, an always-grinning 50-something Texan, was trying to calm me down.
Apparently, I was over-rotating the spin that starts the second part of the routine. Instead of ending up directly in front of Mark, I was landing two to three steps to his right. He had to take a few steps toward me so that we’d be facing each other for the second half of the routine. It didn’t look graceful at all. We practiced my spin several times before our performance. So many times that I got dizzy. Then my shoe slipped off, and I almost fell.
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